Boss babe. She-E-O. Girl boss. Fempower. Boss bitch. LadyBoss. There are a lot of buzzwords about professional female empowerment floating around the zeitgeist these days, and we are HERE. FOR. IT. While it feels powerful as hell to be able to call the shots, owning your own business or being your own boss—no matter your gender—is stressful, risky, and straight-up hard sometimes.
But now is your time to shine. You’ve done all the terrible first jobs. You’ve gotten the coffee and been the grunt. You’ve worked two day jobs and a night job to be able to pay for what one good job could pay you. So whether you are a Jac, who started her own business in college, or a Becca, who just wants to be given lines to read and told where to stand, know that work life is never going to be perfect. You now have a huge decision to make: Are you going to have a boss or be the boss?
What they don’t tell you in all the “Be Your Own Boss and Make $40k a Month, It’s Easy! ;)” articles is this: the highs are high, and the lows are lowwwwwwww. You’re investing your money, your time, your energy, and your emotions into something that is statistically destined to fail within the first year. You’re going against the odds, usually with little to no experience, crossing your fingers that you’re making the right choices and investing your life savings correctly. It’s beyond stressful, emotionally draining, and all-consuming. Have a backup plan? Doubt it. There’s no time for that! So get ready for sleepless nights and endless cups of coffee (with a side of dread) that everything is going to come crashing down before your very eyes at any moment.
But if you’re one of the lucky ones (and by “lucky” we mean the ones who work their butts off and finally get a break) who finds success in your entrepreneurial journey, it tastes real sweet. And we’re here to tell our stories.
Good Things Come to Those Who Work Their Asses Off
When you picture your typical twenty-three-year-old, you probably think of keg stands, all-nighters, and Cup Noodles for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The last thing you’d probably envision is a CEO of a successful self-made business. But in 2011, I found myself in charge of my own company, dealing with employees and inventory, attending trade shows, and learning about business contracts. I was blindly navigating my way through this terrifying unknown landscape, having meltdowns at every turn, all while doing Jägerbombs and chasing boys with girlfriends.
I’d be lying if I told you that I always had an “entrepreneurial spirit” as a child. I was a weird, creative kid, but I was never the girl carrying a briefcase, boasting to people about how I’m “gonna be the next Steve Jobs.” I was super smart, but I was also super artistic and quirky. I was always doodling on the sides of my school notebooks, and I took sewing classes so that I could make my own clothes, since I could never find what I imagined was the perfect outfit. I think I still have the cowhide bell-bottoms I sewed in fourth grade. I sold lemonade on the side of the road like everyone else my age, but mostly because I liked drawing cute little sketches on all the cups we gave out. While other kids were making messes with finger paints, I was in the corner, quietly drawing intricate, imaginary worlds filled with tiny creatures. I was hyper-focused, hyper-critical of anything I did, and just hyper-weird. After puberty hit and I discovered the opposite sex, I turned into a boy-crazy and music-obsessed teenager, and those two things, on top of my innately creative brain, drove pretty much everything I did in my young adult life.
Once the teenage hormones set in, music became my primary entertainment, my therapy when I was feeling low, and my inspiration when I felt creatively blocked. I started attending so many live shows in high school that I ended up making friends with a lot of bands and their touring crews along the way. While my classmates were attending high school football games on Friday nights, I was partying with Skrillex or The Used. At eighteen years old, I left my senior prom early for every emo girl’s dream: working a paid gig photographing the guys in Taking Back Sunday for a magazine.
While I was living my rockstar-by-proxy life, in 2004 I started documenting my experiences on a website called LiveJournal, which was one of the very first online blogs (before the term blog even existed). I wrote about going to concerts, sneaking backstage, and kissing boys in bands. I shared my brooding teenage ramblings about how nobody understood me. Most important, I posted artsy self-portraits with emo lyrics plastered all over them. The more I overshared, the more people gathered at my journal to follow my everyday life. My followers were living vicariously through my emo adventures.
Along with LiveJournal, I was one of the first people to join MySpace (the cooler version of Friendster, RIP) and was in everyone’s Top 8, from Katy Perry to Jeffree Star. Kids started “role playing” me in fictional stories involving other members of my music scene. Girls from around the world copied everything from my raccoon tail hair extensions to my SideKick cell phone to my AOL away messages. I was dubbed a “Scene Queen” by my peers, and the term really fit the strange phenomenon my life had become. Somehow, I found myself ruling this niche corner of the internet.
Ironically, back in my peak scene queen stardom days, having a huge online following came with absolutely zero professional respect. Influencers today run the damn world, but if you were “internet famous” in the early 2000s, you were looked at as…kind of a joke. Thankfully, I had the foresight to see the potential of my online popularity.
Because I was exposed to this whole new, exciting world with endless possibilities, high school life seemed so limited and trivial. My new band friends were traveling the country, living their dream, and having a fucking blast doing it. I was getting little glimpses into what this crazy, touring world looked like, and that excitement was all I wanted for myself. I didn’t have any musical talent, but what I did have was a pretty substantial following on the internet and a degree in progress in Design and Media Arts at UCLA. I’m not going to lie to you and make up some frilly inspirational story about the inception of my brand. The drive behind starting my business was never to be a big powerful boss lady, or to pave the way for the internet generation, or to “stick it to the man.” The drive behind starting my business was to earn the money to do my own thing, travel the world, and party with my friends while I was young and free.
When I was a junior in college, my spending money was running low, and my parents were putting pressure on me to get a job to help pay for my time at UCLA. You read about my Old Navy experience—I knew deep inside that I wasn’t meant to work for anyone else. Around this time, the yellow rubber Livestrong bracelets were having their moment, and my mom threw out the idea of me making thicker rubber bracelets with different sayings on them to sell to my internet “fans.” We did some research online and found a semi-legit-looking company that produced rubber bracelets overseas in a large, one-inch-thick format. I had to borrow the $200 to pay for my first round, and I crossed my fingers that it wasn’t a complete scam. I truly felt like I had just flushed that money down the drain, so that same day, I walked into Forever 21 to get an application (for a “real” job) to pay my parents back for the loan.
To our total surprise, the first round of JV bracelets arrived at our doorstep as ordered. They were black rubber, one-inch bracelets with the word RUTHLESS embossed on them in Helvetica type (inspired by my favorite song by my favorite band, Something Corporate) and the Jac Vanek logo on the back. E-commerce existed then, but it wasn’t widely accepted or trusted. Kids felt more comfortable ordering things online, but no sane adult would dare trust the internet with their credit card information at this point. My dad was still paying for everything with cashier’s checks, and I honestly don’t think I even knew what Amazon was yet. So, instead of setting up an online store, I started selling my bracelets from bulletins on my Myspace page. I’d announce that the bracelets were available, ask anyone who wanted one to email me their order, and then send out a PayPal invoice for payment. It was a long, drawn-out process that my mom and dad helped me with, and it took ten times longer than it ever should have. All of the orders were then mailed out of my parents’ living room, which I continued to do for YEARS after I started. My parents’ entire house was almost filled with my products! It was 100 percent DIY, and 100 percent a huge pain in the ass.
I decided to put twenty bracelets aside from my first order to give to a few of my friends in bands. My band friends would wear them onstage, and their fans would see them, think they were cool, and want a matching bracelet to emulate their favorite rock star. I was actually “seeding product” and doing “influencer marketing” before that was even a thing. Certain band members would request different words or sayings that resonated with them, and because of this, kids were finding a sense of identity and connection to their music idols through these simple rubber bracelets.
The bracelets took off at the speed of light. After selling them out of my backpack at concerts for a year, I was finally respected and trusted enough to jump on tours all over the world representing my own brand. I went on the Warped Tour for the next six years, working grueling sixteen-hour days for two months straight and loving every sweaty, dirty, partying second of it. I traveled all over the United States, to Australia, and to Europe as the face of my brand, meeting the coolest kids and slinging merch out of my booth. Anytime I popped open my Jac Vanek tent, I knew I was going home with enough money to live my unconventional, adventurous lifestyle, all while having one of the best experiences of my life.
With the success of my own brand from this single item, the bracelets began to catch on in the scene. Some of my besties, like All Time Low, Cobra Starship, and other bands asked to collaborate on bracelets, which was an awesome and validating opportunity for me. But it wasn’t long before virtually every band on tour started making their own JV-style bracelets. I was bummed that the concept was being knocked off, but I couldn’t really get mad because I knew the bracelets weren’t some amazing invention, like a miracle cure for cancer or flying cars. It was cool seeing a simple idea of mine blowing up to such epic proportions, though. Those bracelets were everywhere. There was a ripple effect that moved outside of our scene and into the mainstream world, with everyone from John Mayer to Lady Gaga releasing their own JV-style bracelets.
Like any other good business idea started by a single individual, my merchandise, especially my T-shirts, was ultimately knocked off by large corporations left and right. Trademarking sayings is an expensive process, and so is trying to sue big companies for violations. The little guy never wins. I had to sit there with my tail between my legs, watching products with verbatim sayings I had used on my merch sold by big, corporate “hipster” clothing companies. People would send me pictures of items they saw for sale at these retailers, and not only were the phrases identical, but so were the typeface and the word placement on the shirts. These corporations were making millions off my original designs. To this day, they’re selling a complete rip-off of my SORRY FOR PARTYING tank tops at the Jersey Shore. You’re welcome, Snooki.
A few years went by, and the bracelet fad was exploding to the point where the market became extremely oversaturated. Something that had been super niche and special to a very focused group of people turned mainstream, basic, and eventually stopped being trendy. Because of this, the value of my bracelets, and ultimately the value of my brand, started to dwindle. As it is for most small businesses, staying relevant and financially sound has been a constant uphill battle. In recent years, nearly every brand I’ve looked up to, as well as many giants in the fashion industry, have gone bankrupt and gone out of business. That’s why I decided to pivot, expanding into graphic tees, clothing, and home goods.
The transition went as well as one could expect after blowing up from a unicorn of a product and transitioning into the real world of commerce. My bracelets had a CRAZY high margin (the difference between the cost of making the product and the price at which you sell it to consumers), and there was virtually no other product I could sell to make that kind of profit ever again. Producing clothing and home goods was way more expensive, the inventory took up more physical space to store and cost more to ship, and ultimately the financial risk was way higher. But somehow, in some way, I managed to stay afloat…kind of.
Looking back at my sales from my Jac Vanek brand over the last ten years, I see a total mess. There was no rhyme or reason to anything. Some years profits were huge, and then they were minuscule. Some years I made good decisions and netted a lot, and some years I made some dumb decisions and walked away with nothing. I lived in a constant state of anxiety about my brand for an entire decade. Every night, as I closed my eyes to fall asleep, every single possible way to fail completely engulfed my consciousness. I was putting all of my eggs into one really unstable basket, praying that it wouldn’t all come crashing down. I had absolutely nothing to fall back on. I had no plan B. My brand was my livelihood, and it was my only source of income. I started it as a kid, after all. It was all I knew, and that was really terrifying.
My entire experience with my brand was one long string of trials and errors. This was my first rodeo, and I messed up so many times. I ordered too much inventory countless times and sat on dead cash for years. I tried my hand at making cut-and-sew garments that almost sent me into bankruptcy. I rented warehouses that were way too expensive, I went on failing tours that sucked me dry, and I hired employees that I couldn’t afford. But for all the times I fucked up, I succeeded just a little bit more. And as long as I continued to move forward, that was all that mattered.
I honestly and unabashedly attribute a lot of my success to luck. I took advantage of a silly little idea, and I was in the right place at the right time. The other part of my success I attribute to being creative, listening to my gut, and being perceptive and flexible enough to pivot when things felt uneasy or stale. In the last ten years, I’ve never had an investor or taken out a loan (minus that $200 from my parents). To this day, I still own 100 percent of the Jac Vanek brand, it is still the little engine that could, and I am still extremely protective of it. My mom always tells me that I’m too hard on myself and I never give myself enough credit—so here I am, giving myself some credit.
At the end of the day, I’m thankful for how things transpired with my brand. I would never have had the space in my life to join a podcast called the LadyGang with two of the most incredible, inspiring, and hard-working women I’ve ever met. The Jac Vanek brand gave me experience, it gave me knowledge, and it let me have a blast during my twenties. But it never gave me purpose. And now, with the LadyGang, I have that.
#BOSSBABE or Nah
We are living in an incredible time, right?! There are more women in charge in the workplace than ever before, and it’s fucking BADASS. But, as on all parades, I must shit on this one as well. (It wouldn’t be on-brand for me if I didn’t.)
When we started the LadyGang podcast four years ago, I felt a humongous sense of gratitude for finally being in charge of something in my own career. As a performer, I’ve been at the mercy of other people’s opinions, moods, and visions for longer than I can remember, and my job title started to feel more like “dancing monkey” than “actor.” I was ready to have more control in my life, so having the podcast, something that was all our own, felt fucking spectacular. I felt empowered, inspired, and extremely excited.
When we started working on the TV show, we became not only the talent on the show, but executive producers as well. This was when I started to notice that I was extremely stressed out most of the time, resentful of my position some of the time, and more emotional and anxious than ever before (and as an actress, that’s a shit ton). This brand was our baby, so some nerves were normal and to be expected during this transition, but the kinds of anxiety and stress I was experiencing were different than I had ever felt.
It took months of living in it for me to finally acknowledge something about myself that I felt very insecure and even embarrassed to admit. I didn’t enjoy being the boss. Yes, I realize what I have just admitted. I’m sure there are tons of women reading this and cursing my name for taking the women’s movement back fifty years. However, I believe it’s more important now than ever before to vocalize these feelings.
Here’s the reality: not every woman (or man) wants to be the boss, and that’s OKAY. I felt a lot of shame and guilt for not really enjoying this new (and highly sought-after) position of power. I grew up my entire life striving to be at the top of the food chain, only to get there and find out that I didn’t want it (which, in turn, made me sort of suck at it, too). Talk about a slight identity crisis and a major bummer. I figured I would just stifle these feelings forever and keep pretending to love my new title at all the dinners with my equally or more successful girlfriends. “Look at us! We’re doing it! Pour more wine! Let’s make it rain!” we would exclaim. But deep down, I felt like a bit of a fraud.
It wasn’t until a therapy session where I felt like I wouldn’t be judged (or stoned) for making these admissions that I really unloaded. I explained that I hated the stress of being other people’s boss. I talked about how emotional I was after every single meeting or slight disagreement in a conference room. I admitted to panicking anytime my phone rang and it was the office calling. I didn’t enjoy the aspect of the job that required me to “bring work home with me.” By that, I don’t mean actual work, just the inability to stop my brain from constantly living in it. I had always had a job where I could hang up my costume in my trailer at the end of the night, go home, and just be. I hadn’t realized how much I needed and craved that as a working woman. The work I did at home as an actor was learning lines, reading scripts, character studies—a.k.a. the fun stuff. I wasn’t worrying about ratings or whether I had communicated clearly enough with a segment producer about what I wanted to change without offending them or insulting their work. I also realized that sure, I could work harder at being the boss, but guess what? I didn’t want to. There were so many amazing women out there (like Keltie and Jac) who were up for the challenge and genuinely loved it. Why not leave it to those badasses?!
During this conversation/venting session with my therapist, I suddenly realized something super important that would help me with my dilemma of feeling like an anti-feminist. Turns out, I had this entire feminism thing ass-backward. A true feminist is someone who champions women and respects their decisions. A true feminist accepts that even though we have many similarities, we are also dynamic and complicated creatures and are far from all being the same. There is power in admitting what you want, no matter what that thing is. The moment I realized that, I could breathe again, and, most important, I could vocalize my feelings for the first time since this whole TV show started. I told anyone who would listen that I hated being the boss and couldn’t wait to pass those duties on to Keltie and Jac, who love being in charge. It felt fucking liberating.
So here’s the moral of the story: Find out what actually makes you tick. Figure out what doesn’t. Take a look inward and decide what position truly makes you happy, not what the most impressive thing to tell other people is. And the absolute most important thing is to respect the girl who admits she doesn’t want to be the #bossbabe, because we are still pretty fucking rad.
WORK HARD TO PLAY HARDER
Whether you want to be an entrepreneurial powerhouse or you want to have a secure and predictable career path, you get to decide where you shine the brightest and what brings you the most joy and validation in life. You want to be a LadyBoss? Good for you! Go get it, girl, but you shouldn’t feel like a failure if you don’t have your own LLC by the time you’re twenty-five. Everybody measures success differently, and that’s totally cool with us.
You don’t have to be the boss to be important to a company. You can be a cog in the wheel where you don’t have to bear the stress or the weight of an entire corporation on your shoulders. You can have health care and benefits, and leave work on Friday at 5:00 p.m., and have your weekends be stress free. And while doing this, you can still take pride in your work.
So, whether you want to own your own company, be an employee for a big corporation, be a stay-at-home mom, try something new every year for forty years, date a sugar daddy, or you still don’t know what you want to be when you grow up…at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter what you do. No job or career is going to be perfect. There are going to be ups and downs and pros and cons to everything you do. We know it might look like everyone on your social media feed is a travel blogger, drinking Aperol spritzes in Italy, and making $10,000 per Instagram post, but the reality is that most people are on the grind just like you are. All that matters is that you’re doing something that fulfills you when you lay your pretty head down to sleep every night.
Realistically, for most of us, your job is your job, and your fun time is your fun time. In our 24-7, all-consuming lives, it’s hard to balance the two sometimes. You will have a broken heart if you think your job is going to fulfill you in the same way that Christmas morning fulfills you. Your free time is just as valuable as your job. So work hard to play harder.