She wasn’t thinking in terms of structures and spreadsheets. Those were my domains, and they would come. She was thinking in terms of outcomes: a complementary health practice of her own. A space built around her strengths
DEATH BY A 1000 CUTS
Chapter 3 – The Entrepreneurial Bug
In a stampede towards a dream that yesterday might have only been a passing thought, it doesn’t take much for “maybe” to turn into “inevitable”. All it needs is the right mix of timing, encouragement, and a few well-placed stories. With the impetus of those around her, the momentum towards Mandy’s new goal began to feel less like a choice and more like the only direction left to go.
Long before the sleepless nights and the quiet bedside revelations, before the complementary health practice had a name, a logo, or a single paying client, the seed of all it would become was planted somewhere unlikely.
BankaBanka Station.
Red dirt. Big sky. The kind of silence you don’t get anywhere else in Australia; not empty, but full. Full of history, full of possibility, full of the kind of thinking you only do when there’s nothing left to distract you from yourself.
We were travelling then. Robyn and I in our caravan, Mandy in hers. On paper, we were “seeing Australia”. In truth, we were three entrepreneurs at very different points on the same spectrum of self-employment: Robyn and I nearing the end of the hard push of our working lives, Mandy drifting away from a marriage and a version of herself that no longer fit. On the outside it looked like freedom. On the inside, it was escape and recalibration in equal parts.
At night we formed a little half-circle around the fire, folding chairs dug into the dust, the ironbark logs crackling as they gave up the last of their heat. Above us, the stars were so sharp they looked like they might slice the sky open if you stared long enough. In that kind of setting, small talk doesn’t stand a chance. Conversations wandered much further than the road maps we were supposedly following.
It’s funny how often people say they want a simple life, only to spend their evenings talking about the biggest dreams they’ve never dared to say out loud.
That’s where it began for Mandy. Not the business itself, not yet, but the idea that she could build a different life than the one she’d been enduring.
We talked about Dale and Katherine Beaumont and Business Blueprint, what it meant, what it offered, and the strange kind of alchemy that happens when business owners stop trying to pull every lever themselves and step into something bigger than their own four walls. I’d been a long-term member; I’d seen hundreds climb, stall, fall, rebuild, reinvent. There were those who used it to escape employment, those who used it to chase their potential, and those who came because they simply couldn’t stand the alternative any more.
Mandy listened the way people do when something inside them is shifting. She didn’t interrupt, didn’t rush to agree, didn’t argue. She just went still. You can always tell when someone hears a truth that applies to them: the body quietens while the mind rearranges itself around the new information.
Around that fire, with the flames popping at our feet and the night pressing in around the circle of light, she began asking questions. Real questions, the kind that don’t belong in conference rooms or polite networking breakfasts.
“How do people actually start?” “What if I don’t know what I’m doing?” “What if I fail?” “What if I succeed and it ruins everything I’ve built so far?”
There was vulnerability in her voice, but there was heat there too, the first faint ember of the entrepreneurial bug warming itself in her chest. Robyn answered from the heart, speaking about courage and cost. I answered the only way an accountant knows how, breaking it down into dreams, structure, risk, and process. Between us we tried to be honest without being discouraging, but looking back I sometimes wonder if I overstepped. Whether I opened a door she had carefully kept half-closed. Whether the stories I shared would later take root in ways none of us could have predicted.
Because the very next day, the Devil’s Marbles finished what that campfire conversation started.
There is something about that place, ancient, balanced, faintly improbable, that makes people re-evaluate their existence without quite realising they are doing it. Standing among those enormous boulders, sculpted by time and impossible geometry, you can’t help but feel small. But you also can’t help but feel capable. If nature can hold those rocks in such delicate balance for so long, then maybe you can hold your own life together long enough to reshape it.
We wandered through the great natural amphitheatre, the same sort of place where corroborees once drew tribes together, where stories and law were shared under open sky. Mandy moved slowly between the stones, her fingers skimming the surface of formations older than anything else she’d known. The stillness from the night before was there again, but now there was something behind it, not just reflection, but a gathering force. Conviction, perhaps. Or danger. At that stage, it was hard to tell the difference.
She said very little, but when she did speak, the words were almost under her breath, as if she hadn’t meant to send them into the air.
“Maybe I really could do something.”
I’d seen her the day before at the caravan park, changing a flat tyre on her own rig while a semicircle of blokes stood back offering uninvited advice she didn’t need. There she was: on her own, capable, uncomplaining, travelling the country with two kids part-time and a bundle of unspoken history behind her. It was an image that stuck with me. So when those words came out among the Marbles, it was as if I heard the next chapter of that same story.
Robyn shot me a look that said exactly what I was thinking: You’ve started something here. And perhaps I had. Between the campfire, the stories of Blueprint, and an ancient landscape that refused to let anyone pretend life was fixed and immovable, something had shifted in Mandy. The idea that the life she’d been living was no longer the one she had to settle for was no longer abstract; it had weight now.
In the tongue-in-cheek way that only hindsight allows, I sometimes say, “It might all be my fault.” But the truth is more complicated than cause and effect. It was timing. Grief. Exhaustion. Possibility. Place. All of it layered together in a way neither deliberate nor benign. That country forces you to be honest, and Mandy, standing between rocks that had balanced longer than civilisation itself, seemed to understand for the first time that she didn’t have to keep holding everything together the way she always had. She could build something new from the ground up. Something that expressed who she was becoming, and, with any luck, something profitable enough to match the status and security she knew she needed.
That was where the entrepreneurial bug didn’t just bite, it burrowed.
What followed didn’t happen overnight. That’s one of the myths people like to tell. They imagine a lightning bolt moment, a grand declaration, a neat “from this day forward”. But real change arrives in layers. After BankaBanka and the Marbles, she didn’t leap straight into business planning. There were no announcements. Just a quiet internal shift.
Days later, weeks even, the idea kept circling back. She’d mention a skill she had. A person she could help. A gap she’d noticed in the complementary health space. To a casual ear, it sounded like conversation. To anyone paying attention, it was foundation work.
And then came Business Blueprint proper.
Stepping into that Blueprint environment, the crowded rooms buzzing with business owners at every stage of triumph and exhaustion, was like watching a match land on dry grass. The energy, the belief, the relentless optimism, the stories of people who had rebuilt from nothing, all of it seeped into her. She wasn’t just welcomed; she was gathered up. Absorbed into the movement.
People saw things in her before she had language for them. They told her she had presence. Empathy. A natural fit for complementary health. They told her she had a story that mattered, a gift for holding space, a way of making people feel better simply by being in the room. Coming out of a marriage in which her value had thinned out over time, this wave of external belief didn’t merely lift her; it carried her.
Confidence, for Mandy, didn’t grow in cautious increments. It bloomed in one dense, heady burst. And with that bloom came something that felt both exhilarating and dangerous.
Momentum.
The bug had bitten; now the stampede began. A dream that had been only a thought under the stars at BankaBanka became, under the lights of Blueprint and the enthusiasm of new friends, something approaching inevitability. There is a peculiar pressure that comes from being seen as “on the brink” of something. From being told you can, you should, you must. It winds itself around your sense of self until doing anything else feels like betrayal, not just of the people cheering you on, but of the self you’re trying to become.
This is where the first cuts were made, though none of us recognised them as such at the time. They were hidden inside the euphoria of movement. Being held up by friends who believed in her. Being encouraged by us from the sidelines. Being propelled forward by a community whose default setting was, “Why not you?”
These were soft cuts. The subtle sense that she should keep up. The quiet pressure to always be moving forward. The habit of putting her own rest and doubts second because the dream, now shared by so many others, seemed to demand constant tending. The way the idea of the business began to take up more mental space than her own recovery.
And yet, that same circle, friends, Blueprint, the people who had helped amplify the dream, also carried the seeds of remediation. In time, it would be those same communities that would remind her to stop, to breathe, to examine the cost. To admit when the bug had bitten deeper than was healthy. To step back from the stampede long enough to see where she really was on the map.
But that comes later.
For now, there was the night she sat bolt upright in a different bed, in a different town, at 2:13 a.m., with the house quiet and her children sleeping down the hall. The thinking that had begun at BankaBanka, been solidified among the Devil’s Marbles, and supercharged in the thought of Blueprint rooms coalesced at last into something solid.
She did not leap out of bed or flick on the light. She didn’t start sketching logos or making lists. She simply knew.
I can do this.
Not as a wish. Not as bravado. As a fact.
She wasn’t thinking in terms of structures and spreadsheets. Those were my domains, and they would come. She was thinking in terms of outcomes: a complementary health practice of her own. A space built around her strengths. A life she could claim rather than rent. A home her children could grow from rather than simply pass through.
Rolled up in the stampede of encouragement, bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and carried by the belief of those around her, Mandy stepped across a line she would not recross. Whatever came next, the long days, the early mornings, the invisible cuts of self-employment would all track back to this constellation of moments. A campfire. A field of impossible rocks. A room full of determined strangers. Two old entrepreneurs in a caravan. And a woman on the brink of becoming someone she was only just starting to recognise.
The bug was in. The dream was set. And the safety nets, friends, the promise of Blueprint, the fragile but real ties that held her together, were already in place, even if none of us yet understood how much they would be needed.
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