EXECUTIVE SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW

Nine years ago, Lisa Johnson was $30,000 in debt, a mother of twins and rebuilding her career from an office junior’s salary. Today, she is a global business strategist whose businesses have generated more than $30 million in revenue, a Sunday Times #1 bestselling author, a keynote and TEDx speaker, and the host of the Making Money Online podcast, which has passed 500,000 downloads. Her turnaround began with an unlikely first venture, a wedding planning business, which she scaled into a known urban wedding planning company before pivoting into business strategy and consulting.

Lisa is the founder of One To Many, a passive income programme that has helped tens of thousands of entrepreneurs build courses and memberships around their expertise, an education company The Contemporary School of Business, a high level network called Proximity and the CEO of garden office construction company Belle Cachette. Her insight and story have been featured by the BBC, Forbes, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Business Insider and Fast Company, among others. An ambassador for the anti-bullying charity Bullies Out, she draws on her own experience of childhood bullying to champion authenticity and resilience in business and beyond.

Her central message to today’s business leaders is a deceptively simple one: money matters, but happiness matters more, and a trusted personal brand, built on truth rather than performance, is what now separates leaders who thrive from those who merely scale. We caught up with Lisa to find out how she did it, and what she believes every CEO and founder needs to understand about visibility, positioning and self-belief.

Q1. You went from $30,000 in debt to a $30 million business in under a decade. What was the real turning point?

Necessity! In realised that nobody was going to come and save me, and I had these kids to feed. I honestly believe that when you have to, you realise it’s time to find a way. I started to think about ways I could make money passively so that I wasn’t just being paid for my time because I didn’t have much time. I then started helping people realise that they could sell any knowledge they already had, and it coincided with the pandemic. I was lucky in some ways – I’d grown a small business teaching people how to make money at home, and suddenly everyone needed that.

Q2. You built much of your success on courses and memberships rather than one-to-one coaching. Why does passive income work so well for entrepreneurs?

It works because most entrepreneurs care about impacting a lot of people, and with 1-1 you really are only impacting one person at a time. This way you can teach the same thing in an hour to 1000 people and also make 1000 x the profit in the same time. It means you aren’t always relying on what time you have available  – you build an asset, and you keep making repeat money from it.

Q3. Personal branding is now central to your work with CEOs and founders. Why has it become essential rather than optional?

Over the last few years, some fundamental things happened that created what we call a trust recession. AI getting huge, the economy correcting itself after the pandemic, governments not being trusted – this all creates distrust, and the only way people buy in a trust recession is from people with a personal brand that they know already. It’s no longer optional, and the people out there making the most now are the ones with really strong personal brands, opinions and messaging.

Q4. What is the biggest myth about building a personal brand that you would like to bust?

That you have to be controversial. You absolutely don’t. You just have to be real and talk about the things that really matter to you. Being controversial just for engagement or rage-baiting online so people notice you will get you attention, but it might not get you the right attention! Instead, just be more you.

Q5. You say happiness matters more than money. How do you advise leaders to balance ambition with wellbeing?

I think it’s about starting with looking at what you want your life to look like, and not many people do that. They grow a business and then realise that business might have made them money, but it’s also taken away their time, health and therefore happiness. I did that too and then realised I didn’t need all of the money as much as I wanted to work less, so I started again. It’s so easy to follow a ‘success’ path that isn’t created by you but by everyone on the internet. Start with what a perfect day would look like and work backwards.

Q6. What is one piece of advice you would give a leader who is scared to become more visible?

Most people are scared in case they get negativity for being visible, but every time you make the decision to hide because of that, you’re basically saying you care about strangers’ opinions more than creating an amazing life for your family. Realising that always stops me from giving in to that fear. Know your purpose and what really matters to you.