You could say that it all began with $73k in student loan debt. 💰️ 

…For a degree in Geography. 🌎

…That Chenell Basilio had no specific reason for obtaining. 🤦

Seriously.

(This is the problem with asking kids to pick a college major, then take out exorbitant loans to pay for it.)

Luckily, in Chenell’s case, that debt became the driving force that pushed her to build a solo venture which would generate nearly half a million dollars—

In a single year. 🤯 

And if you’re impressed by that, you’ll be even more impressed by how she managed to burn the whole thing to the ground. 🔥 

✍️ How did you pay off your student debt? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.

CSI: New Jersey

As a kid, it was evident that Chenell Basilio had inherited the nosy resourceful gene from her mother.

No matter what sort of gossip was running through town, Chenell’s mom could always get to the bottom of it, digging up public records and old newspapers to uncover the truth.

“She should have been a CSI,” Chenell jokes.

The rise of the internet during Chenell’s teenage and early adult years swept her into rabbit holes of research.

She was baffled when classmates seemed so certain of what they wanted to do with their lives. 

Why were they thinking so far ahead? There was so much to discover in the present.

Chenell preferred to deal with the world as it came at her.

This mindset is pretty great for adaptability — but troublesome for planning ahead.

At best, Chenell had “concepts of a plan” for her future (is that joke tired yet?).

Well, you gotta do something

Chenell graduated from college and realized that she needed to find creative ways to tackle her Everest-sized mountain of student loan debt.

So she did what came most naturally — she burrowed deep into the research rabbit hole. 🐰

Along the way, Chenell discovered Pat Flynn’s Income Reports blog series, where he detailed sources of income from various projects. 👇

That gave her an idea. 💡

Chenell didn’t have multiple sources of income (yet) — but she did have multiple sources of debt. So she launched a blog series called Debt Reports.

Every month, she wrote about how she was paying down her debt. 👇

The blog kept her accountable, which was important — but it also had the potential to earn income. 🤑

So in an effort to grow her blog on a shoestring budget, Chenell began consuming all the free marketing content she could get her hands on. 

At the time, she was working at AAA (ya know, the roadside assistance company) — in the marketing department.

(When she graduated college, CSI mom sent out Chenell’s resume to hundreds of companies, until one day she got a call from AAA. Go mom. 💪)

Chenell brought her fresh marketing ideas to AAA, and before she could say “holy shit I’m not qualified for this”, she was managing their monthly advertising budget —  in the millions. 🤯

The leap into entrepreneurship

Chenell’s personal financial blog was beginning to gain traction, so in 2016, she attended FinCon — a huge conference for creators working in the personal finance niche.

At the conference, she connected with many of the popular finance bloggers she had been following for years.

And when they discovered that she was managing millions of dollars of ad spend at her day job, they had only one question for her—

“OMG, will you please help me run ads for my blog?”

Um. Yeah. 🤷

So Chenell began taking on marketing clients.

✍️ A few finance bloggers. 

🍎 A few online course creators. 

🛠️ Her step-dad’s flooring company (because why the hell not?) 🤷

And as word of her talent spread, so did her side-business. She was waking up at 3am to service clients, working on the train, and taking calls during her lunch break. 😰

By May of 2017, Chenell had saved up enough money to feel comfortable leaving AAA, and took the leap into full-time entrepreneurship.

F*ck yes, Chenell. F*ck yes. 👊

Her business rocketed 🚀

In 2017, Chenell’s little marketing company (which was composed of only Chenell) brought in $42k in revenue.

She was thrilled. That was almost as much as she made at AAA.

Then in 2018, she absolutely soared past that number, and raked in $117k, officially becoming a six-figure solopreneur. 👏

She closed out 2019 with $212k in revenue — still running the business completely on her own. 🤯

“Why did people think entrepreneurship was hard?”, she thought, rolling her eyes at the millions of failed businesses around the country.

(Not so fast, superstar…)

In 2020, the world of digital entrepreneurship exploded.

The pandemic brought about a combination of two things that ignited a fire under Chenell’s business:

• Those who lost their jobs wanted to re-skill themselves to be able to work virtually.

• Online course creators who taught those in-demand skills had insane growth opportunities.

And guess who specialized in marketing for online course creators?? 👇

Chenell’s business took home $452k in 2020. 🤯

I wish that was the end of this story 😣

If you’re wondering how Chenell managed to serve $452k worth of client business as a solo operator — so is she. 🤷

But she had help from some pretty remarkable market conditions.

For the non-marketers out there, here’s what the digital marketing landscape looked like during the pandemic:

—

👉 Imagine behemoths like Pepsi Co., Procter & Gamble, Anheuser-Busch, and every other corporation of their size pulling their ads out of the Super Bowl. 

👉 Without competition from huge companies with deep pockets, the price for a coveted 30-seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl would plummet — making room for the little guys to get some huge bang for their buck.

👉 This is what happened in the world of digital advertising. 

—

Worried about the economic and supply-chain impacts of the pandemic, big companies dramatically cut their ad spend. 

This drove down the price of digital advertising, allowing smaller companies to see unprecedented returns on their ad spend.

Companies like…

Chenell’s clients — many of whom were online course creators, whose demand was simultaneously skyrocketing, as millions of people sought to re-skill themselves.

So let’s be clear. Chenell: 

1. Had far too many clients for any one person to handle.

2. And was too overwhelmed to optimally serve them.

But the extraordinarily novel condition of the digital advertising market, paired with the unprecedented demand for the services her clients offered, still delivered stellar results.

…Until it didn’t. 🤦

Oh shit oh shit oh shit

As COVID chaos cooled, the digital advertising market began to correct itself, and it wasn’t so easy for Chenell’s clients to achieve solid returns on their advertising spend.

And since Chenell barely had enough time to wipe her own —ahem—, she couldn’t provide the attention that each client deserved to get back on track.

She tried (and failed) to onboard freelancers to help with the workload, but it was too little too late, and she wasn’t prepared to properly manage them.

Clients began bolting for the door. 

A few at first…

Then many…

Then nearly all.

In 2021, her revenue plummeted from $452k to $136k. And by 2022, it had fallen even further to $65k.

Chenell doesn’t recall much from that period — it was all a haze.

She was too mortified to reach out to her peers for insights on the constantly-evolving digital marketing landscape. Her ego told her she should already know everything.

And looking back, she feels like this was her biggest mistake:

Chenell was watching her business burn to the ground, and she didn’t know how to fix it.

So she just did nothing.

And it died. ⚰️

Well. That’s depressing.

Chenell was too traumatized to rebuild her digital marketing business.

But she couldn’t live in a hole forever — she needed to figure out her next move.

In the same way Chenell stumbled on Pat Flynn’s personal finance blog years before, she caught a story about how Mario Gabriele earned $300k in one year by writing his newsletter, The Generalist.

This piqued her interest, but no matter how deep she dug, nobody had written about how he had actually pulled it off.

So she decided to reverse-engineer his newsletter growth. ⏪

Chenell spent 60 hours pouring over every piece of data she could find, and compiled a deep-dive detailing how Mario Gabriele created his hugely profitable business from writing a newsletter.

She thought other people might be interested in this too…

So on December 4, 2022 — she published it.

And since she had just reverse-engineered how someone earned mad dough by simply writing a newsletter, she figured she could do the same for herself.

Growth in Reverse was born.

It was a shitty —but valuable— lesson

Chenell isn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

Growth in Reverse is a very manageable business, which pays her bills and gives her the lifestyle she desires.

When asked “what does ‘wealth’ mean to you?”, Chenell responded:

And in an effort to keep others from repeating her mistakes, Chenell has:

👉 Finally opened up about her experience (for which we all are eternally grateful).

👉 Launched a community for newsletter operators to help each other, learn from each other, and never feel like they’re alone.

Way to turn it around, Chenell. 👏

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

P.S. — Chenell is a member of my mastermind, a collection of badass entrepreneurs who care about each other’s goals as much as their own. Think you belong with us? Hit reply and tell me.

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