How I Built 5 Multi-Million Dollar Companies: Marcia Kilgore | E99

Quick one. The Diary of a CEO Live, my live show, my live reincarnation of this podcast is coming on tour, and it's coming to a city near you. There's a link in the description below. Put your email address in, and I will email you when tickets go on sale. Can't wait to see ya.

(instrumental music) You know, when you have that kind of experience early, you grow up very fast. And you know what's important, and you prioritize, so. Another deep question.

All of these are deep questions.

Yeah. Okay, so-

Did you feel like a bit of a fraud?

No.

No?

I totally thought I knew what I was doing.

People don't do that. They don't just, like, change-

Well, you do when you're 20, right?

They don't.

People came back. Madonna and Uma Thurman and Oprah. (instrumental music)

Marcia Kilgoor. I can't actually believe what you're about to hear. I can't actually believe that one human being could have achieved that many successful business exits back-to-back. She's built companies like Soap & Glory, like Bliss Beauty Pie, which she's building at the moment, and these companies have sold for tens and hundreds of millions. They've made hundreds of millions in annual revenue. And the remarkable thing is, she's not just done it once. She's not just done it twice. Not three times, not four times. She's done it five times. And I sat here with her, trying to figure out why her. What was it about Marcia that made her achieve such tremendous things in her life? And I think we finally got there. I think we finally found the answer. And is it something that you can replicate? A lot of it is, and I think that's what makes this podcast today so interesting. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. (instrumental music) There is so much that makes you unique. So much. And sometimes I think, and I think I'm guilty of this to some degree too, we don't always see ourselves as being unique, because we're inside of our minds, and we're, you know, we're behaving in the way that feels natural to us. But when I look at your s- your story, and the decisions you've made since you were very, very young, it's so clear to me that there's something so different about, many things that are so different about you, and I wanna kinda get to the root of that. What is the foundation of that difference? What was it, what was the cauldron, the experience that created the person you went on to become for the following, you know...

Wow. That's starting-

... couple decades.

... with a very, very deep question, isn't it?

It is, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think that, um, I grew up in a, a very small town, um, and a, and a small city, and Canada at that time was, you know, relatively simple. And I always had a hunger to learn more and read more and find out more, and kind of knew that I didn't really fit in in a small city. Um, so very early on, I kind of started to think, "Well, what can I do, and how can I get out of here?" But I didn't have much guidance. So my father died early, and my mum was not necessarily someone who would help me, you know, look at universities, for instance, or say, "Hey, you should real- Your grades are really great. Why don't you study and do this or that?" 'Cause she had never done it herself. So she, um, no one really in my family guided me, and at that point, there weren't really university counselors or anyone doing that job in, in high schools, at least in, in Canada. So I think for me, uh, I realized quite early, probably when I was a teenager, that I just needed more stimulation, and I needed more than what was there just to, you know, feel fulfilled and, and keep my curiosity going. Those teenage years, you have a lot of experiences, and apparently what happens during your teenage years, because your brain is forming in a very different way and it's starting to sort of solidify, right? Um, those kinds of experience really stick with you through your whole life. And I remember having several part-time jobs when I was a teenager, um, all, you know, simultaneously while going to high school, and never really finding a job where I thought that the person in charge of the business was doing it well. So (laughs) I worked at a gym, for instance, and I always thought, "Oh, they could do it so much better if they were just doing this, that, and the other thing." I taught aerobics classes, and I thought aerobics was so boring the way it was done and tried to do it, you know, in a very different way so it was more fun for the people who came. And just always trying to improve the experience, because I was in quite a mediocre setting. Lovely setting, but you know, very average. Very, uh, you know, middle Canada. Um, and so that was probably a bit of the, a bit of the stimulation.