Transcript
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Welcome to Scale Tales – the business storytelling podcast where entrepreneurs, executives and experts share firsthand accounts of those magical moments when they achieved something bigger than even they could have imagined.
I’m Alicia Butler Pierre. You know what I love the most about business? It’s so universal. There’s more than one business model and there’s more than one way to build a business, grow it, and scale it. But one thing is for sure, as an entrepreneur you will encounter resistance, insurmountable challenges, and you’ll earn quickly to diversify your sources of leads and income. Bali is the setting of our next scale tale and it features someone who defiantly protected her business from a major threat and emerged victorious
This is Ep. 23 – How Jet Van Wijk Scaled an Agency to Multi-Seven Figures Despite a Wrongful Instagram Account Deactivation

I’m Jet Van Wijk, Founder and CEO of the Laptop Lifestyle Master program. I’m currently in Bali and this is my scale tale.
It started on 2017 when I was for my education abroad in Bali. I studied hospitality management because I wanted to do entrepreneurship. I didn’t know exactly what. I met people there who were working from their laptop. And I realized that that could be such a cool thing to do, to be able to work and travel the world, set your own schedule.

And from that moment, I was hooked. But at this point, I was actually still following my study. In the last year of my study, I found myself in a corporate job in London working for Hilton Hotels. This was in the basement. The office had no windows, no natural air. And I realized how soul sucking a 9 to 5 was and that this was totally not for me. So from this moment, I had my eyes set again back on that time where I met people who were doing something different, who were working from their laptop. And that’s really where the journey began of trying to figure out how I was going to be able to work online.
How could I live this remote lifestyle? So after I finished the year at this corporate job, I actually got offered a really big job as marketing and communication director. And I declined it. And I decided that I was going to go back to that place where it all started, to Bali, and try and figure out how I was going to do this.
And I remember sitting in the airplane looking at my screen that I was going to go from Amsterdam, where I’m from, to Bali, Indonesia, with no plan, with only $600 to my name. I got that $600 by selling all my clothes and all my furniture. And I was on my way. And I arrived there.
That is really where my journey started, to become an entrepreneur in the first place. Now, I failed so many things. I tried all the ways to work online under the sun, and eventually I stumbled upon becoming an influencer. So I became a travel blogger, and I started making content for hotels and travel organizations.
But very soon I realized how toxic this was for my mental health and how fake the online world was, especially of an influencer. So again, I was at the pivotal point where I was like, okay, this doesn’t feel right. It goes against my gut feeling. I want to do something different. I want to be able to work online, but I don’t want it to be tied to being Instagram famous or to being an influencer. And then I looked back at all the failures I had in this year, all the things that didn’t work out for me, and I realized that trying all those things, I did gain digital skills and that is what I grabbed onto, and I started to become a freelancer.
So the skills I learned online, such as building a website or managing social media, I now started offering to businesses online as a service. So this is called freelancing or service providing. And now four years later, I never thought I was going to be able to scale that into a multi seven figure company. Freelancing was amazing for me. I was able literally to live that remote dream where I could work from a cafe. I was doing some client work. It was actually pretty relaxed. I was like, okay, Jet, this is a point where you’re going to have to make a decision. Are we going to keep just going like this and live this chill, relaxed, remote life or do we want more?
Do we want something bigger? This is a story not many people know about. In the pandemic, I had more time and I could take on more clients. But of course, as one
person, you have a limited amount of time available in your day. I had a friend who recommended me a platform where you could get an apprentice, basically someone you can mentor and they can do some work for you each day and in return they learn from you. That sounds like a good first step to get someone in.
scheduled 20 interviews and I remember hearing all of their stories and actuallym realizing that most of these people that wanted a mentorship opportunity were from third world countries and had a really heartbreaking story. There were people from Nigeria, Ecuador, so many different countries telling me their struggle, how they can’t afford to help their family, how they’re scared to go on the streets.
And after all those interviews, I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I have to take them all. I want to teach all of them how to work online, how to learn these skills that I got the privilege to learn and see how I can make their life better. Not many people know that that is how my community, my mentorship and my teaching, started five years ago.
Before she knew it, Jet started an online community of the people she wanted to help by teaching them marketing skills. She eventually hired some of them.

This was such an amazing thing because actually the stories there, the lives we changed, you know, from a girl, Omalara, who was scared to go out on the streets because in Nigeria there is a specific squad that actually attacks and kidnaps and rapes people that are carrying a laptop. And now she was able to stay at home, work for me, make way more than she would in her native currency and support her family.
And I have so many stories like that. That is where my impact mission started of, hey, when you’re educated, you have power. When you learn digital skills, you can step into this online world and you can be part of that new story that we have right now with AI, with technology, with digital marketing. And it is truly for everyone. And that is where this drive and this fire started of I want to help people, I want to teach people how to work online. And also this realization for me as a Dutch girl, I worked in a corporate basement office in London.
I changed my life by working online. But you know what, for someone in such a situation of the people that I was helping at that point, it is not just life changing, it is lifesaving to be able to work online. And that just has always driven me and inspired me to help people and to teach them.
This was a win-win situation for everyone involved. The people in Jet’s initial online community received skills that could radically transform their lives and, well, Jet was able to realize that dream of building a bigger company.
After doing that successfully for a few years, I then started to open my community, my courses to the public. Then I decided to monetize it. I was still doing apprenticeships and scholarships for people in underprivileged situations. At the same time, I was also marketing it and selling seats, lets say in my academy, in my community for people to learn as well how to work online and start their own freelancing business.
That started pretty small I would say. I was doing everything myself. I was making the appointments, I was doing my marketing, I was doing the closing calls, I was doing the coaching. So literally all the departments was me. And then I slowly started to scale that further. I decided in 2021 to make one of the biggest investments to date that I had done into myself, into a coach.
So this was a coaching program for someone who was helping coaches, so helping e-learning companies to scale further. And I remember telling my parents I found this person, they can help me, actually make this a main business instead of this smaller business, and I remember my parents saying,
“Yeah, that would be fun if it worked. If it worked, everyone would do it. I don’t think you should invest that much.”
It was $7,500 for three-month program. That was a hard one because of course, you want to feel supported, but at this point I already remembered these previous situations I had because it was the same when I wanted to quit my corporate job and start to work online. My parents were also supportive, but also against it. It was like a combination of both. And my grandparents, everyone was saying,
“No, you shouldn’t do this, you’re making a mistake.”
I still listen to my gut feeling. I was again at this point where it was like, okay Jet, your gut feeling tells you you have to do this, your parents say no, but you just going to do it. So I decided to invest in myself and I started that program and in the first 24 days I already made 20k.
Thank goodness Jet decided to listen to her intuition because she soon made her first $100,000 month and most recently, a $250,000 month. Throughout this scale in revenue, she also scaled her remote team to over 25 people.
I sometimes say I scaled this into a pretty big monster. If I look at all the departments and all the things that we have right now that I would have never expected when I left that corporate job that I would be running something like this.
I started this mission as well to help people. And that still is the underlying why. And my motivation to do this. But I never expected that it could be something so amazing and change so many people’s lives. But of course, that journey those big numbers and even this award and all the things I achieved, that that comes at a high cost as well.
There were many, I call them “businessships,” you know, hardships, businessships. Some that we are still going through because I believe that you set a goal.
Let’s say you want to get to 50k, you want to get to 100k or whatever or like an award or speaking somewhere. When you get there, you realize that actually it didn’t really make your life better. It didn’t really change anything. You don’t feel this magical, wow, I got this milestone. Now you realize that yeah, you grew something, you scaled something. But at the same time it also comes with bigger problems. You know, the bigger you scale, the more problems also come with that.
As the saying goes, more money, more problems.
It’s definitely been a lot of sacrifices, a lot of things I had to overcome. If I think back I have a few pivotal moments in entrepreneurship that I’m like, okay, that was pretty painful. And when you’re in it you don’t think you will get out of it. The first one was definitely when I started to scale my coaching business you’re a new leader, you have no idea how to lead a team properly.
I have done the positions that they are in, so I know at least how to guide them and how to train them. You’ve never been a leader before, so how are you going to motivate people to work towards your mission and how are you going to find the right people? Because everyone sounds nice on a hiring interview, right? And maybe I was a bit naive. I was hiring people because we had a nice chat and I didn’t really know how to qualify people for these new positions that I created.
And that was very hard because it resulted in me sticking too long to people which damaged the business. Where my coach would have said already three months ago, let this person go. I was like, no, come on, let’s try. We discussed it and that actually being damaging for your business to hold on to someone who is not aligning with your company or not putting in the work that you need them to do.
And that was hard. I had to make this realization of your team members are not your friends, unfortunately. You have to make tough calls in terms of hiring, in terms of firing. That was definitely a really big lesson I had to learn.
And part of that really big lesson meant having to do the work of those jobs she once delegated. This gave Jet even more insights and clarity about the true nature of the work she needed to delegate and the skills required to perform the work. This knowledge helped her make better informed hiring decisions moving forward. But she realized there’s another hurdle when you start delegating or outsourcing work to others.
It takes a big cut off your business because a lot of sales is commission basis. So where I was getting more time back, I was actually also giving up a big percentage. There was this point, where I had a bigger team but I was making the same, if not sometimes less, than when I was doing everything myself. And this is like that breaking point of scaling where you are investing in outsourcing so that you can grow further so that you can do bigger things.
But at the same time, those things cost a lot. And then you literally kind of make the same as in the profit I was making before alone versus the profit now with a bigger team was the same. And I have had so many nights where I was questioning how do I get out of this point? How am I going to get above that where it’s actually profitable and it’s making way more money to have a big team? And even thoughts of like, should I just go back to making it simple and doing it all myself? But then I cannot scale, then I cannot go further because I’m only one person.
Jet did the hard work required to get to the point where she grew her company into something bigger than she thought possible, only to reach a point of questioning whether it was worth it. But, as she would soon discover, there’s a handsome reward on the other side of this initial point of scaling. It’s what famous business author Seth Godin refers to as “The Dip.” It describes that moment when temporary setbacks happen that threaten to derail everything you’ve been working toward, but true winners not only work through “the dip,” they are also able to bask in the glory of increased revenue and profits on the other side of the setbacks.
And of course it was worth it in terms of scaling because then you are at a point where you really have a lot of time back. So I could focus on my impact mission, to collaborate with charities, speaking and doing my passions while the business was running pretty much on its own. And then you realize, it was worth it. But in those moments where you don’t see it, it’s sometimes hard to keep going for sure.
And just when Jet thought she had worked through the challenges of scaling, another major setback happened in 2024. I was making the most money. But it was also the hardest for me because in June, July, August, we lost both of our Instagram accounts. They got disabled. And that was our main traffic source. So now you have a 25 plus team that relies on you.
You have set costs that are huge. You have advertising costs. My set costs were around 70k and we were doing advertising at 25k a month. So if all your traffic disappears, you have a big problem, and I’ve had other colleagues or people in the similar situation where their accounts got disabled and they actually decided to stop the business completely from that kind of traumatic experience, to lose everything overnight. And it didn’t matter that I was in Forbes or TEDx speaker, blah, blah, blah. I got disabled like that.
There was nothing we could do about it. So it was an ego death for me. It was a realization of, we have eggs in other baskets, but Instagram was our biggest basket in
terms of traffic. And when that disappears, you are just done. I would have never expected that to happen. But being in that situation, I realized it happens to a lot of
entrepreneurs. And I’m really lucky that we found a way in the end to get both of them back.
To be clear, Jet said their Instagram accounts were not hacked. The real reason they were disabled is far more sinister.
Competitors were paid to take us down. it was a whole black market thing. it was very heart breaking
yes, I make money, but, I’m helping people. I’m teaching marketing, so why would this happen to me? But all the OnlyFans girls, their accounts get to stay online, and me running actually a legitimate business, it can get taken away like that and nobody helps. So on multiple different levels. It broke my business. It broke my heart. It was horrible to go through that.
And it happened while I was on a book tour in the United States, doing TV shows and all of that, where they ask you, what is your Instagram? And I’m like, I don’t have one right now. So every day I got stabbed with this during the book tour. I can definitely tell you that this has been the hardest year for me because of that event, and we’re still recovering from it. But now, I can tell you again that it was worth it to go through that because now we’re picking back up.
It’s worth it. I’m so happy that I didn’t give up.
I’m happy she didn’t give up either and I’m sure her team and her customers are equally as happy. As painful as that experience was, Jet wonders if she may have spoken it into existence. It started with an interview she had on another podcast.

They asked me,
Jet, what would you do if you lost it all?
And I said, “I would just build it again because I’ve done it once and I can do it again.”
And then it actually happened and I had to do that. Right away, we started a new account, running ads, boom! Going for it, doing all kinds of Hail Marys, to try and get traffic back or to find out where our leads are or to follow up on pending deals, because now we disappeared from the Earth. So finding other ways to do telemarketing, to use WhatsApp, to use other platforms, LinkedIn, TikTok, like, literally the whole team, we were all on war mode because we were like, this is not happening!
We are not accepting this. It’s not fair and we’re not going to give up. And actually those months, we didn’t even do bad revenue wise. Definitely not great. But actually we pulled it together as a team and all of them stick with me at that point. It was hard. I also spoke with my dad about this. He is an entrepreneur, and I was like, “Dad, I feel like this was my first year in entrepreneurship.” Because to be honest, the times before that I had problems.
But those problems were very small. Sitting in the late nights, there’s nobody. Like, you’re all on your own. You literally have your hands in your hair, you don’t know what to do, and somehow you come out on the other end. It’s definitely a scar, let’s say of scaling, but it’s worth it. That’s, that’s the funny part. I would do it over again, all of it, you know, and go through this again. You have to be smarter. You have to diversify more. You have to learn from this experience and try to change your business model a bit so that it doesn’t depend on Instagram so that you can scale without needing those platforms.
And don’t forget – build your own online community. Build your own email list. Build your own website. In other words, don’t be dependent on a social media platform to handle these things for you. Coming up after the break, Jet will share more details about how she scaled her team and her company into a multi-7 figure enterprise.
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Jet Van Wijk is the founder and CEO of the Laptop Lifestyle Master program. A program that started with an idea to do something on a large scale that involved empowering others to build online marketing skills and freelance their way to a better life. All was going well until a competitor took down a major communication hub for them.
But Jet is a fighter and now, she’s built an even stronger team with even bigger, bolder ambitions. Listen as she shares those early days of scaling and how it ultimately paved the way to a multi-7 figure business.
The way I started was a bit old school. I didn’t sign up to platforms at first. I did email outreach. I pitched for three days to 50 companies a day on email. I wrote a really custom pitch and was like, let’s say I really thought about what to write and I tried to personalize each. And I came back from that with my first clients, I think two. And from there they referred me and that is how I quickly scaled even as a freelancer and then an agency.
And then we started to diversify with platforms like Upwork. There’s a lot of high-ticket clients on it. And nowadays of course there’s way more platforms than when I was starting and way more tools and AI and things like that that you can utilize to pitch and to lend clients on platforms.
But for anyone starting, I can recommend that you also just try to do practice tasks, try to do some briefs, build a portfolio because that is what actually matters a lot, that people can see the work you’ve done and obviously make a decision based on that.
A lot of business and sales is a numbers game. So they send maybe three pitches, they don’t get a response back and now they give up and they are sad and they’re like, this didn’t work, but it takes grit, it takes determination. You have to pitch every day to x amount of numbers. You have to follow up with these people because the money is in the follow up. It was my only plan at that point.
There was no plan B or C or D. I was like, I’m abroad. I think at this point maybe I had like $400 left because influencer deals was this whole problem that they came very late and you know, also not really high pay and it was quite annoying. So I didn’t have much money and I was like, Jet, you have to make it happen now. There’s no other way. And that’s why I just didn’t give up until I landed my first clients. And from there started to grow it further.
About those influencer deals…remember, Jet started her online career as an influencer. This was how she began developing her online marketing skills. Did being an influencer with a strong personal brand give her an advantage in quickly growing her online community?

This is what personally I love so much about the personal brand. It is that you are on the forefront as a person. So even the people who followed me as influencer and travel blogger, they followed me because of me and because of how I write and what I do and to follow my journey. And now I change, let’s say, the offering on the back. So as travel blogger, I was promoting other people’s products or services or hotels, but it was still me on the front end.
Now it was still me on the front end, but I just brought in different offers. So as a freelancer, as a marketing agency, or later on as a coach, an E-learning company. But it was still me as a personal brand. And that’s why I think it’s so strong, because it can move with you. You as a person will never keep the same interest or the same aspirations and the same business. So it is really smart actually to build it behind the personal brand so that you can pivot whenever you like.
And when you do have to pivot and you have the fortune of being able to scale your operations, you may come to that crossroads that Jet described earlier. Do you select the path where you do most of the work yourself so that you can bring home more personal profit, or do you select the path where you delegate and pray that you can scale revenue past the break-even point? As example, consider the following. Suppose you as a sole proprietor currently generate $10,000 a month. The costs of doing business are extremely low because you are not spending money on ads. Now consider if you begin making $50,000 a month, but now you are spending $5k on ads. You’ve also hired
appointment setters who receive 8% of every closed deal and closers who receive 10%. Because you have more customers, you must hire more people to handle the volume. This means even more money is being spent on labor costs. By the time you pay all of these new team members, your take home pay is still $10,000 a month, the amount that you made as a sole proprietor. For Jet, she was able to move past this break-even point once her company made…
somewhere above $80k. Once we got above $80, then I was taking home like way more. Profit margins also improved because obviously when you just start with advertisement, especially in the business I’m in, it’s not direct sales. So first people have a conversation with us, see if it’s a fit, we hop on the call, they join or not. That sales cycle is a bit longer than for example, a product someone can buy right away.
They see an ad, they follow us maybe for 10 days, but maybe for 30 days before they make a purchase. So that sales cycle is a bit longer. It takes some time before you’re going to see your return and ad spend. And then once you get to that point, then obviously your profit margins go up again as well. And then, it’s worth it. Scaling the team is also required. When I was closing myself because it’s my product, because I’m the face, I know the most about it, it’s also my expertise.
Of course I have a very high closing percentage. I think I was closing 90% of the calls, like ridiculously high. And a regular salesperson or closer, normally it’s 25% industry average. So one in four calls and my closers, I trained them so hard that I got them to 30, 40%. So, also very good. But of course there’s again a difference there. You might have the same amount of calls in your calendar, but if I was taking them, I would have made way more money. But now I delegated that to someone and they close at a lower percentage.
And that is again kind of that sacrifice you make that you’re like, okay, this is in the name of scaling, you have to keep going with this. That means you need more calls to make the same as you were doing before. And then at some point, of course, after years, we know all our conversion numbers. How many conversations we need to have so many calls, to have so many second calls, closes, show rate – all of those things we can calculate now to know where we’re going to end up, let’s say in a given month and what KPIs we need to go for. But in the beginning, you don’t really know. So you find that out when you’re like, okay, $50, that sounds cool, but wait a minute, what is left of that? So, um…yeah.
With all this talk about scaling a team, revenue, and impact you may be wondering an obvious question – how does Jet’s online community work and how could you join if interested?

We have different points of entry, depending on what people need. We have the Laptop Lifestyle Master program which is really our three-month group coaching program where we help someone from A to Z in terms of finding their niche and what skills are they going to learn, what services will they offer all the way to landing clients.
It’s the full journey actually of becoming a freelancer. And then we have different programs for people with higher levels. So an agency accelerator for agencies that want to scale. Coaching mastermind for people who want to also build a coaching community like mine. So it really is for all service providers and beginning service providers who are offering services digitally.
And then we also have Community Pass which is called Jet Circle where you will get access to calls with me biweekly and also with my experts. My marketing
communication director with our email marketer, with our Facebook ads expert. A path to basically join our community and to be able to join the chats, to ask questions and to attend calls as well. Different ways for people to engage with us and to join our community.
There’s also different resources outside of her online community that Jet provides as well, including her TEDx Talk and some free advice.
In case someone is curious about my influencer story more in detail, I actually just did a TEDx Talk and this was about social conformity. What social media actually does to our brain and how we conform with social media, let’s say. Let your kids listen to it because the influencer life is not that nice as we think it is.
Any idea for a business or for doing something different that you have in your mind, this has been given to you either by the universe, by God, whatever you believe in, but you got this calling, and it is your responsibility and you owe it to the world to tap into that calling because it’s your unique gift. It’s the way that you can leave a legacy on the world. It’s the way that you can make an impact and help people.
And we get a lot of resistance, which is our own thoughts, which are telling us maybe you can’t do it. Maybe it’s not for you. This is difficult. That is, I think, the hardest part about entrepreneurship is to completely tune out the resistance and to learn how to control those thoughts and to focus on the calling. Because if you’ve been given that by whatever you believe in, then it is meant for you and then you already have it in another reality. So you owe it to yourself to give it your all and to chase those dreams and those goals and to never give up on them.
Entrepreneurship is not for the faint at heart. If it were easy, more people would do it. Take comfort in Jet’s story and those of other entrepreneurs who powered through the adversity and emerged even stronger. Here’s a recap of some lessons learned from Jet:
1. Scaling operations is not limited to an increase in your team, revenue, and
impact. It also includes an increase in problems.
2. Let go! Your employees are not your friends. Holding on to those who are
consistently underperforming can be more damaging to your customers
than the pain of firing them and having to do their work temporarily
before you can find their replacements.
3. Remember “The Dip.” The beginning stages of scaling are painful. As you
hire more people, you must take time to train them. You’ll work harder for
the same pay or less. But stay the course. The liberation that comes on the
other side when you finally have a well-tuned operation that can function
without you is priceless.
4. Diversify your sources for lead generation and income. Do not put all of
your time, effort, and energy into one source or platform.
5. Words have power! Be careful what you speak into existence. It might
actually happen.
6. Build your personal brand so that as your interests or careers change,
people will still follow you.
7. Establish Key Performance Indicators or KPI’s to track performance and
understand where improvements must be made.
8. As former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, “Never, never,
never give up!”
Thank you Jet Van Wijk for sharing your scale tale with us! If you’d like to follow Jet on Instagram, join one of her online programs, read her book, or watch her TEDx Talk, go to ScaleTalesPodcast.com to gain quick access. Again, that’s ScaleTalesPodcast.com.
Thank you for listening! If you learned something valuable from this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you’re list

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I produced and narrated this episode. Additional voice over by Clarence Levy III. Audio editing by Olanrewaju Adeyemo. Music production and original score by Sabor! Music Enterprises. Video editing by Gladiola Films. Show notes by Hashim Tale.
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