From ER Nurse to Subscription Box Success: Lo Hixson's Inspiring Journey

Ever wondered how you can turn a passion for self-care into a thriving business? Meet Lo Hixson, the inspiring founder of Passion and Growth, who transitioned from being an ER nurse to a successful entrepreneur. Lo shares her journey of overcoming personal challenges with self-perception and how it led her to launch a subscription box aimed at boosting women's confidence. Launched in January 2020, Passion and Growth gained significant traction, especially during the pandemic, emphasizing the crucial role of self-care and mental health.

Lo reveals the pivotal moment when she decided to leave her nursing career to fully invest in her growing business. She initially relied on pre-launch strategies and social media but soon discovered the power of Facebook ads to expand her subscriber base. Liam worked with Lo back in 2020 and helped her get her marketing and offers dialed in using the same strategies BusterBox has used to sell millions of dollars worth of boxes.

Over the last 12 months, Lo has faced challenges and adversity in her business, including a hacked Facebook ad account. Her story underscores the importance of resilience and strategic planning. Hear how she overcame these challenges by going back to basics, making things as simple as possible, and doing what has proven to work in the past.

She was also the first person to follow Liam's Subscription Box CashMachine Training and earned an extra €20,000 in revenue during Q4, which helped massively with cash flow.

This conversation is a testament to the power of resilience, simplification, and the willingness to adapt, showcasing that even successful businesses face unseen struggles. Tune in to learn how Lo’s commitment to her vision and her customers helped her navigate through tough times and come out stronger.

To Join The Waitlist for Subscription Box University head over to www.Subscription BoxUniversity.com

You can check out Passion and Growth here: https://passionandgrowth.com/

If you have a question you want answered on the podcast, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the FREE Facebook group, and post your question there.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 3: 0:36

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Subscription Box Answers being recorded live from the Sub Summit Studios in Dallas, sponsored by Bold Commerce. I'm really excited to do this episode and I'm delighted to announce we have a very special guest. This is Lo Higson, who is the founder of Passion and Growth. How are you?

Speaker 2: 1:02

I'm fabulous, happy to be here.

Speaker 3: 1:04

Thanks very much for jumping on. For the people who don't know anything about your business, what do you do?

Speaker 2: 1:10

So I own a self-care subscription box for women to help boost confidence and self-love.

Speaker 3: 1:16

Very good. And what made you get into the self-care subscription industry?

Speaker 2: 1:23

Yeah, I've asked this a lot over the last couple days and so for me it was my own, just like personal journey. So those of you who know me, you know a little bit about my background, but I was a ER nurse for eight years before I started this business, and so I did not have any like plans of starting a business. I entrepreneur was not in even my thought process, but through my own journey of just growing up, you know, here as a woman kind of always feeling like, you know, I'm not good enough, I'm, I don't look like we're supposed to look like the women on TV or you know, there's something about me that's not lovable, just all these like things and pressures we have I noticed that I was just struggling so much and struggled with like a negative mindset and even though on the outside, externally, I was always similar to how I am now bubbly, happy, excited, always smiling but inside it was just like that was not what was happening on inside of my brain and so I, in like my late 20s, was just looking for something to change that narrative. I was like you know, like I don't think that I have to feel like this every day and are other people feeling like this, because I feel alone and is it normal to just like pick myself apart all the time. And so I went on my own just like personal growth journey and just invested a lot into myself and, you know, reading, journaling, therapy, just like kind of figuring out, like doing a lot of just how, like the psychology of like how our brain works and how we can change our mindset.

Speaker 2: 2:57

And so I spent a few years on that kind of journey on my own and not really having like a community to you reach out to or share what I was going through. And so after a few years of me going through that process, you know, I was like I cannot be the only woman who feels like this. I was like there has to be other people who struggle with this as well and are looking for resources and ways to prioritize themselves. And you know, as women I think a lot of times we put ourselves just as an afterthought and let me help everybody else and we sometimes, at the end of the day, are just left with what's there and it's not always enough. So that was really what transitioned me into this. I thought how can I help, how can I serve, you know other women in this and I was.

Speaker 2: 3:41

You guys saw some of you probably saw Julie speaking earlier. I was subscribed to her subscription box, sparkle Hustle Grow, and got that in the mail one day while all these thoughts were percolating in my mind of how, like, what does this look like? How can I help women, how can I bring them more resources? And I was like a subscription box and meanwhile, like I said, I had no business background, I had no business starting a business but. But I did and just got the idea like how to start a subscription box, let's go. And three months later, passion and growth was out into the world.

Speaker 3: 4:11

It's an amazing story and I know you've had a lot of success very quickly with it and this may resonate with a lot of people in the audience. When did you decide to go all in and quit your job and do it?

Speaker 2: 4:25

Yeah, I launched my business January of 2020. And so it was two months before the pandemic. Meanwhile, like I said, I'm working in healthcare, so I'm like, great, there's a global pandemic. I just launched this box. I still am just like figuring out everything by myself. So in my head I'm like, oh, this is going to just crash and burn, like I don't know what's going to happen now, and so I didn't know like how to project inventory. I didn't know what was going on and I certainly couldn't have expected that in the pandemic, suddenly self-care and mental health and just taking care of us exploded Like that industry. It was already big, it got even bigger. And so now I went from. You know, I started with like 75 subscribers my first month and then, by you know, april, I think, I had like 300 people and I was packing in my two bedroom apartment in Austin, texas, still working full time. So it was just, it was a journey, and every month just kept getting bigger and bigger. And so I was like, wow, this is really cool, like we're growing and growing and every month there's more people, and so I think it was fall of 2020. I, it grew to yeah, I guess I was still four, 450, somewhere in there and I was.

Speaker 2: 5:42

I had a choice to make. I thought this was going to be a side hobby, like something fun, something I could give back to the community. I felt really passionate about it, never anticipated it to be a full-fledged business and suddenly this was now taking up a ton of my time. I had all these subscribers with very little knowledge of how to run a business, and so I had a decision to make.

Speaker 2: 6:01

I can either bet on myself, go all in which is exactly what I'm like trying to tell other people to do, like bet on yourself, like believe in yourself, and or I could continue what I'm doing and not give this business my all. So I just decided on a whim. I woke up one morning. I've been riding on my mirror by the end of this year I'm going to run my business full time, and by September I was like we're going to do it, let's see what happens. And so I literally went to my job, turned in my, I guess I gave him a month notice and was like I'm going to leave and go run this business and see what happens.

Speaker 3: 6:37

So to reach the number of subscribers you needed to reach, to make that happen, what was your main marketing channel? How did you do it?

Speaker 2: 6:46

facebook ads. Um, I think I got really lucky in the beginning. Um, I took a quick course in june. Well, let me actually back up a little bit. This will probably relate to a lot of you if you're a new startup I launched. I got my initial maybe 20 subscribers from all my pre-launch stuff creating social, all of that and then I sat there after all, you know the pre-launch stuff creating social, all of that and then I sat there after all, you know the pre-launch people and all the people who are on my email list subscribed. And then I sat there how do I get new people? Where do you find people at? I've exhausted already my email list. So I got to acquire some.

Speaker 2: 7:20

And actually I had a quick one-hour course on Facebook ads and I was like, well, this seems like a great option, let's try. Followed that just to a T, started testing ads, just started playing with it. I mean, like I said, I did not know what I was doing and I just started testing different copy, images, audiences and kind of just figured it out by playing with it and that I saw results from that. And this is again, you know, four years ago now. So it was so much cheaper to acquire people in a lot easier. There's been a lot of changes since then that make it much more difficult now with Facebook ads, but then it was like I felt like I'd struck a gold mine and that's how I was growing so fast and then again compiled out of the pandemic and it was just like everyone's home on their phones, on their computers, locked in their house, can't go anywhere, and so I got really lucky and also just putting myself out there and trying with those Facebook ads. So that's how I initially grew.

Speaker 2: 8:18

And then I linked up with Liam. Right around the time I decided to leave my job, I knew I needed some more guidance and so I had found Liam in some Facebook groups. Read some of his blogs, articles, was like oh, this guy, like he knows what he's doing and he this is what I love about it he speaks at a level that you can understand he's doing and he this is what I love about he speaks at a level that you can understand me as someone who, like it, came from health care. I don't know a lot of these big business terms, a lot of things that get thrown around. I could not even understand at that time. I was on at that level that I could process that information, and so he gave it in such a way that I could understand. It was simple and he had the results to prove that he knew what he was talking about thank you.

Speaker 3: 9:00

And so I think a big problem people face is they have a great idea right, but they don't take control of their marketing, so they can't get it out there. The box is great, the website's great, but they end up going round and round in circles for a very long time. What kind of advice would you have for those people?

Speaker 2: 9:24

it is scary thinking about marketing your business, especially if you are a startup. My head's little and this is like okay, sorry, um, I think as a startup, it's marketing can be really hard. You know, we have great ideas and you're like this is the million-dollar idea, I can do this, I can solve this problem. And then you go and you put all the work into it and get all the things functional and ready to go, and then you kind of have this moment where it's like oh, but I have to market this business. I have to get out of here and start talking about this and pitching my business and it's super scary about this. I'm like pitching my business and it's super scary. It's very scary. And so I think that is a piece that a lot of people shy away from.

Speaker 2: 10:04

I think there is the idea still sometimes, oh, if you build it, they will come. And I don't necessarily think that that applies in this like specific industry, because I mean, if you, you can build it, but if you are not putting your idea in your box in front of people, people are not going to know it exists, and so you have to build your audience somehow, and I, I personally love like using Facebook ads. I know that that's not always like for everybody. There are different ways to market, but there has to be a plan. I mean, if you're sitting at home being like I have this great idea, I have this awesome website, I have awesome pictures and I have a passion, so hard for it, but if you're not telling anybody about it, no one is going to come to you, and so I think that's a big hurdle for entrepreneurs, but it's also, I think it's you kind of got to go back to. Well, you just have to do it and figure it out. I mean, just like you figured out how to get the website going and maybe you outsource people, maybe you build it yourself.

Speaker 2: 11:01

You have this idea, but at some point you have to get comfortable in being uncomfortable, and part of that marketing is one of the most difficult pieces and it's very easy to ignore because you can get caught up in a lot of the other things.

Speaker 2: 11:17

Let's do pretty pictures and's, you know, focus on social media, or let me do anything, but talk about my business like I will find anything to do, and that's where I have to say, like this is the part of being an entrepreneur. That can be really hard and it doesn't feel good sometimes, but in order to actually like see success and, you know, if you want to actually turn this from an idea to a business, you're gonna have to decide, like, how bad do you want it and what are you willing to do, and what does your marketing look like for you? I mean, if are you an influencer with a bunch of social media following like cool, maybe that can be your angle. I mean, do you like the marketing side of like facebook ads, paid advertising great, that can be our deal. But, like you have to pick something and you have to do it, because if you're sitting back waiting for people to come to you, the reality is like people aren't just going to come to you yeah, 100%, no, 100%.

Speaker 3: 12:11

If you want to build any kind of business, you have to be able to acquire customers in a repeatable, profitable and scalable way. That's literally the only way forward. And I also want to touch on something that I don't think is covered in this industry a lot, and that's dealing with hard times, because in business, not everything's going to be perfect all the time. There's peaks and valleys, different seasons and, yeah, it's not always going to be perfect. I know recently you had some challenges in your own business, but you've overcome them.

Speaker 2: 12:46

Now you want to talk a bit about that I think that's yeah, I think it's important to talk about. We just, you know, right before us there was a podcast and one of my friends was talking about all the challenges like she's faced. And it's so true, I, you can plan and plan and plan all you want and things are still going to happen and I've had.

Speaker 2: 13:03

So I could talk for hours about all the mistakes I've made, all the product issues I've had, we've had nightmares you know, from living in a two-bedroom apartment and having an 18-wheeler back into my parking lot and drop a pallet and I'm like I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that. So it's like you have those issues, but then you also have the issues of you know. Last year actually this time last year I was at this conference and woke up one morning and my Facebook ad account had been hacked and like $6,000 was stolen, and it absolutely crushed me. I was like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? And if any of you deal with Facebook on a regular basis or have just heard it trying to get a hold of support and all that can be really, really, really difficult. And so I remember sitting here like I couldn't hardly enjoy the conference because I'm trying to figure out how do I get these people out of my account Because they're literally racking up dollars in my money. Like I came here, there was already like money gone. I was trying to like turn the ads off. I went to a session. I came back out, they had turned the ads back on and money was just funneling out of my bank account, and so I ended up like figuring out how to shut it down. I contacted support, like the account like ended up being able to be, you know like kind of inactive, but I never got access to that account Like I had to restart a new ad account. And so I did just say you know, I do rely a lot on Facebook advertising. It's repeatable, it works. But of course I have other strategies and other organic strategies. But in order for me to continue my growth pattern, I relied on that.

Speaker 2: 14:31

And so all of a sudden, at that time I was manufacturing products, I had a steady like a thousand subscribers and I had already pre-ordered products. Since it was June. I had pre-ordered products through like October or November at a thousand, and so suddenly I was not able to advertise. It took forever to try to get just even my pixel to where I could average. It was just. It was a giant mess and in that process I ended up losing like several hundred subscribers, just because you know they churn out. I you know if I've been like a 10% churn, I'll be totally honest with like what my like churn rate is and so at a thousand subscribers, I'm losing a thousand or a hundred people a month. That's a lot of people you got to recover.

Speaker 2: 15:11

And when I could not recover those. It started to decline. So now I hit, you know, summertime, fall and I'm left with like 200 units of each product like sitting on my shelves. So you do the math on that, I don't know. It's a lot of products. I have about six products in every box, 200 leftover each.

Speaker 2: 15:28

I now literally just have stacks of dollars sitting on my shelves and running this kind of business, cashflow is so hard and that's just the reality. I mean, no matter what size you are, cash flow is very, very difficult. And so I hit a spot where I was sitting on so much inventory it ate up all my cash flow and I now, like, could not even manufacture products because I hit a spot where, well, I don't have the cash flow now to pay several months of products in advance because I have all those products sitting here. So I eventually recovered not recovered started a new ad account. It took months to really build back up the data that I had on there. I mean, I had three months of data on this ad account in Pixel and it was I mean, it was dialed in and they just knew who my customers were. So I had to kind of like start from scratch.

Speaker 2: 16:16

The climate now and then was much different when I first started, and so it really got me in a pickle. I mean, there was a moment there where it was like what am I going to do? Do I sell? Do I have? Like I just don't know how to get out of that situation. And it was really really, really challenging and difficult. And so I'm.

Speaker 2: 16:37

I probably didn't start to really recover some of that revenue and everything until the end of last year and then this year, and, honestly, part of that, I had to just go back to the basics. I was like what worked when I first grew a lot, when I was first starting out let's strip down some of the things I've done. I had brought on different people and we were trying new things and I was like we cannot focus on that right now, because right now we just like throwing money out the window and we've got to just go back to the basics. And so around that time I, you know, I reached back out to Liam and was like look, this is the, this is the situation I'm in. It's not pretty and it's not good and I really don't know what to do from here. And he really gave me some solid advice. I I mean in Q4, just from, basically, your reply. Yes, emails. He's got a great course on how to get like quick revenue into your business, just from like simple emails, and I did.

Speaker 2: 17:31

I took his email marketing strategy that I hadn't implemented before and was able to bring in like I don't remember the number, was it like $20,000? A grand or something? Yeah, it was like it was like 20,000 dollars of extra money I was able to bring into my business in quarter four by just like you know, restructuring things and finding a new way. I mean I really went from being in the trenches and thinking I'm gonna lose this business that I've worked hard for and I've I've left my full-time job and I've put everything I have into this and I'm going to lose it because something happened kind of out of my control. But I now have to figure out how to come back, and so that pivot was really hard. It was really hard and I, you know I've started. I recovered. Now the customers that I lost. I'm kind of back to where I was, but it really made me learn to A simplify.

Speaker 2: 18:18

Sometimes trying to do all the things Shiny object syndrome is real, and so I stripped some things out. I ended up having, you know me, as the founder, had to take on a lot of roles that I had been delegated, because it was getting to a point where, like well, if I can't pay people, I mean I'm just gonna have to do it myself, and so it was really challenging, and I think it's important to just remember, as an entrepreneur too, like those moments are going to happen. And I'm not going to lie, I kind of felt like I got off pretty easy my first couple of years. I was like, okay, like this has gone fairly smooth and this happened. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I was waiting for something like that.

Speaker 2: 18:58

And so I think it's just important to remember like these things do happen.

Speaker 2: 19:02

Nothing is ever going to be perfect.

Speaker 2: 19:04

Even I think the people that you see on social media are these bigger businesses and it looks like things are just like grand and perfect.

Speaker 2: 19:11

I think it's important to remember that like there's behind the scenes and every single business has struggles that maybe you don't necessarily see, but it's good, I think, to share this, to remind you that I mean, if you're going through a really hard time or just trying to figure out what you can do.

Speaker 2: 19:26

Sometimes you just got to like, keep grinding, keep doing it and just take it back down to what has worked or the simplicity of it and just have faith that if you keep going like it is going to to work out and don't give up. Because if I had given up last summer or in fall, when I was like I don't think I can do this, I don't have the mental capacity, I'm drained, I'm exhausted, I'm fighting Like I can barely pay myself, I was like this isn't a good feeling, and so it's just, I think, so vital to remember that sometimes, right at the moment when you feel like you're going to give up, is exactly when you need to keep pushing, because you never know what's on the side of another side of this, so that was an amazing answer.

Speaker 3: 20:07

Thanks very much and fair play for turning it around, because you did great you did very, very good and you turned it around pretty quickly as well, and so, yeah, fair play. So for anybody here I don't know what stage everybody's at, but for anybody that is new and they're maybe like at the very beginning or they're thinking about setting up a subscription box, what advice can you give them?

Speaker 2: 20:35

I think start before you're ready. I mean there there's going to be bumps, no matter when you start. I think one of the beautiful things, um, was I had no idea what I was doing and I think my me having just no clue, I think, was actually beneficial to me, because I just started doing things I didn't really know. Um, I took, you know, a course to like start my box. I followed that to a T and I just implemented, implemented, implemented, um. If you would ask me, like was I ready? Um, yes and no, I mean I was ready in the sense of like, hey, let's start a business, but was I actually ready with any of the foundational pieces or what it consisted of or what it was actually going to look like? Absolutely not.

Speaker 2: 21:15

But I just think just taking action, any action, is better than no action, and you will figure out pretty quickly when you start taking action what actually works and what doesn't. And so you know, I've tried, I don't know. We'll pick a hundred things and 96 of them haven't worked and four have. And so I think it's important to not get bogged down in how you're going to maybe necessarily get to point Z, but just to remember, just to take it, you know, one step at a time, and you're eventually going to get there. And you don't always have to know the path. But the actions you take will get you closer, because you're going to realize what works and what doesn't work.

Speaker 3: 21:50

Thank you. Thanks very much for coming on and joining me. It's been great to interview you here and you're the perfect person to jump on when they to jump on when they said when they asked me to do it, I knew I wanted to bring you on straight away because people would relate to you so much. I'm your star. You've set up your company, so we'll finish it up here. If anybody wants to reach out to you, where can they find you?

Speaker 2: 22:13

Oh, of course, you can find me at Passion and Growth on all platforms Facebook, instagram, linkedin. I'm Lorena Hickson yeah, facebook, instagram, linkedin. I'm Lorena Hickson. Yeah, come be friends with me. I just recently started getting into LinkedIn, so I'd love for you guys to find me connect there. It'd be great to. I also am super open if you have questions. If you find me on any of these channels, you can pop in my inbox ask me a question. I love helping other startup founders out. That's really where my passion lies with helping other business owners like startup founders out.

Speaker 3: 22:42

That's really where my passion lies, with you know, helping other business owners. Thank you, so we'll be back next Monday with another episode for everybody listening here and listening at home. If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post it there. Thanks very much and have a great day. Bye-bye.